Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
SECURE MEMORY ACCESS IN A VIRTUALIZED COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT

Abstract:

A processor supports secure memory access in a virtualized computing environment by employing requestor identifiers at bus devices (such as a graphics processing unit) to identify the virtual machine associated with each memory access request. The virtualized computing environment uses the requestor identifiers to control access to different regions of system memory, ensuring that each VM accesses only those regions of memory that the VM is allowed to access. The virtualized computing environment thereby supports efficient memory access by the bus devices while ensuring that the different regions of memory are protected from unauthorized access.